On E6 (pathfinder)

I think I’ve mentioned E6 before, though I’m too lazy to look it up. The thing is a large number of my posts from here on out on pathfinder will be at least somewhat influenced by the ruleset variation.

While I’ll summarize, here is a link to one of the enworld forums in which E6 was developed.

Summarized: stop leveling at 6th level. No increases in BAB, no increases in numbers of spells cast or levels of spells achieved, no additional hit points, etc. There is some continued growth in that every 5000 XP you get another feat. Depending on minor variation that may be a ‘feat or skill point’. On the other hand it’s something of a violation of concept as intended to wind up with double-digit skill ranks.

Now the big thing this does for crunch work is it forces a major revisit of ‘what is good or bad’ for various classes. If you are rating a wizard build based on the strength of things you’ll get as you reach levels 8+, your rating fails. And if you find a guide that says “great for lower levels worthless for mid to upper” it becomes “great.”

Much of my crunching is going to be from this point of view. As an example, I just did a crunch of weapons for best ‘base’ DPR. Something sort of important happens if you have static bonuses in the double digits – if you’re getting +11 to hit and damage due to BAB and such. Crits start being more important. But in E6 you’re pretty much never going to get those levels of static bonuses. So base weapon DPR matters more.

I’ll try to remind folk that this is my bias when I do more evals, but I’d like to get it out front for the regular readers or those who read the archives.

About…

I've experience with many priests of many races and specs on several servers. The more I play, the more I realize how much I do not yet know. This is a share of some of what I have learned.
My main these days is Zingiber on the Undermine server.